The fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the British Library is an opportunity to look back at the leading role the Library and its parent bodies played in introducing computerised information retrieval for science and medicine to the UK. Between 1965 and 1975 experiments in searching databases of medical research were carried out in partnership with the US National Library of Medicine (NLM)  together with computer scientists and medical users in the UK. Following the success of these experiments the Library launched BLAISE (British Library Automated Information Service)  as a national public service in 1977.

The NLM began publishing Index Medicus, an index of medical journal articles, in 1879. In 1960 printing was computerised and the machine readable data on tape became available for information retrieval. A publicly available US service, MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) opened in 1963 with MEDLINE  (MEDLARS online) going live in 1971. [1]

 In 1965 the NLM agreed with the National Lending Library for Science and Technology [2] to supply tapes in exchange for MEDLARS records of UK medical literature. With these tapes in hand the Office of Science and Technology Information [3]  funded Newcastle University to develop a retrieval package based on NLM’s IBM software to run on the university’s English Electric computer. Subsequent projects in 1973-74 tested the online environment and current awareness services with medical researchers and librarians in Leeds and Manchester over an online telephone link. [4]

The next step in service delivery was to establish online access to the NLM. University College London had set up a link to the US through ARPANET, the early version of the internet [5], and in 1973 British Library Research & Development [3] along with other public bodies, joined this network. This programme was historically significant as the first international communication over the internet. Project STEIN (Short Term Experimental Information Network) involved sixteen centres (e.g. the Royal Post-Graduate Medical School) each with its own terminal and trained intermediary.  The number of users (362) and searches (1217) was substantial and the study confirmed the need for intermediaries who were experienced in using the system and formulating searches. The clinicians and researchers who accompanied each session evaluated the results and gave feedback. Despite difficulties with telecoms, satisfaction was high as searches delivered articles that were new together with articles that were familiar to the users, thus increasing their confidence in the search. [6]

These encouraging results led the Library in 1977 to launch BLAISE, a fully supported public service providing Medline and databases for toxicology and cancer. Tapes were delivered monthly from Washington by diplomatic bag to a computer bureau in Harlow to run on an IBM 370 machine with NLM’s ELHILL retrieval software. Mounting tested software on an established bureau service meant that BLAISE went live within a year. Users benefited from the dedicated BLAISE PSS (Packet Switched Service) network and a support team that provided training, documentation and a help desk, alongside document supply from the British Library Lending Division at Boston Spa.[7] At first researchers and clinicians used Medline for checking references or keeping up to date but it has since become an essential tool for the evidence based medicine community to generate systematic reviews and contribute to the Cochrane Library.[8] From 1977 the Library was the sole provider of NLM databases in the UK but in a political decision in 1982 NLM, as a federal agency, was required to release its products to US online providers. With the ensuing competition BLAISE was no longer able to support a UK based service and it was relaunched as BLAISE-LINK, a UK portal for online access to NLM. Within a few years customers moved over to commercial online hosts and BLAISE-LINK closed. 

Today, the Library continues online healthcare with the publication of AMED (Allied and Complementary Medicine Database). This database supplements the coverage of Medline in areas such as alternative medicine, palliative care and rehabilitation. [9]

We have come a long way in fifty years.  In 1973 searching involved expensive telecoms and computer access, clumsy equipment  (who now remembers audio-acoustic couplers?) minimal records, complex Boolean search strings and the need for skilled medical librarians to navigate all these obstacles. Now, there is free access to the internet and PubMed, open access full text and sophisticated relevance searching empowering every user. Information has exploded:  in 1976, Medline and its associated files had 3.5 million records, by 2022, PubMed had 35 million. [10] 

References [BL shelfmark]

All URLs accessed on 7 July 2023.

[1] MEDLINE History. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline/medline_history.html

[2] The National Lending Library for Science and Technology (NLLST) was the predecessor of the British Library Lending Division and later, the Document Supply Centre. The service is currently available as British Library On Demand.

Barr, D. P. The National Lending Library for Science and Technology. Postgraduate Medical Journal. 42.493 (1966): 695. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2466097/pdf/postmedj00407-0003.pdf

[3] The Office of Science and Technology Information (OSTI) was the predecessor of British Library Research & Development which promoted and funded R&D by the UK library and information community until its merger with the Library and Information Commission in 1999.

Baxter, P. "The role of the British Library R&D department in supporting library and information research in the United Kingdom." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 36.4 (1985): 276. https://www.proquest.com/openview/77a69cbd42dd0412f39b217892f95ac2/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1818555 

[4] Barraclough, E. Information Retrieval, its origins in Newcastle. http://history.cs.ncl.ac.uk/anniversaries/40th/webbook/infoRetrieval/index.html

Harley, A. J., and Elizabeth D. Barraclough. MEDLARS information retrieval in Britain. Postgraduate medical journal 42.484 (1966): 69. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2465839/pdf/postmedj00398-0003.pdf

[5] Kirstein, P. T. "Early experiences with the Arpanet and Internet in the United Kingdom." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 21.1 (1999): 38-44. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc/10.1.1.112.8527

Computer History – Internet history of the 1970s.  https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

[6]  Holmes, P. A description of the British Library’s short-term experimental information network project. pp 231-237 - 1st International On-line Information Meeting, London 13-15 December 1977 / organised by On-line Review, the international journal of on-line information systems. (1977). Oxford ; New York: Learned Information. [available in the British Library at shelfmark 2719.x.4085 ]

Holmes, P. (1978). On-line information retrieval: An introduction and guide to the British Library's short-term experimental information network project / P.L. Holmes. Vol.2, Experimental use of medical information services. (Research and development reports (British Library) ; no.5397). London: British Library Research and Development Department. [available in the British Library at shelfmark 2113.560000F BLRDR 5397 ]

Trials were also made with other scientific and engineering databases on the Lockheed Dialog system.

(7) Holmes, P. L. The British Library Automated Information Service (BLAISE). Online Review 3.3 (1979): 265-274. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/eb024003/full/html       

BLAISE also provided bibliographic databases for the British National Bibliography and the Library of Congress, finally closing in 2002.

[8] McKibbon, K. A. Evidence-based practice. Bulletin of the medical library association 86.3 (1998): 396. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC226388/pdf/mlab00092-0108.pdf

Cochrane Library. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/about/about-cochrane-reviews

[9] Allied and Complementary Medicine Database (AMED) https://www.ebsco.com/products/research-databases/allied-and-complementary-medicine-database-amed

[10] Miles, W. (1982). A history of the National Library of Medicine : The nation's treasury of medical knowledge. (NIH publication ; no.82-1904). Bethesda, Md.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine. [p.386 -3.5 m records, 1976] https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/bookviewer?PID=nlm:nlmuid-8218545-bk

PubMed Milestone - 35 Millionth Journal Citation Added. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd22/brief/nd22_pubmed_milestone.html

Further reading

Bourne, C., & Hahn, Trudi Bellardo. (2003). A history of online information services, 1963-1976, Cambridge, Mass. ; London: MIT. [Available in the British Library on open shelf: Humanities 2 Reading Room HUR 025.04]

Written by Richard Wakeford (Science Reference Specialist, Retired). Richard was a member of the BLAISE support team, 1981-1984.

"Garden cucumber" from Blackwell's Herbal, British Library 34.I.12 -13

Some of our earliest high-quality digitised manuscripts and printed books are now available again through our website for anybody to read. They were digitised from the mid-1990s on, using the "Turning the Pages" software created by the Library in collaboration with Armadillo Systems. You might remember seeing them on stand-alone electronic consoles in various parts of the Library. The digitisations include realistic animations of the pages being physically turned and laid down.

Some of the items involved are important in the history of science:

• The complete Codex Arundel, a collection of pages from the private sketchbooks and notebooks of the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci, predominantly dealing with physics.
• Highlights of Andreas Vesalius's "De Humani Corporis Fabrica", the first modern anatomical textbook, with artwork thought to be by the studio of Titian.
• Highlights of Elizabeth Blackwell's "A Curious Herbal", the first British herbal by a woman, created in the 1730s to buy her ne'er-do-well husband out of debtors' prison.
• Highlights of John James Audubon's famed "Birds of America".

Feel free to browse them on your computer.

We are happy to announce that this week we have acquired the Wiley Digital Archives of several major learned societies. The collections currently available are those from the New York Academy of Sciences, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Royal College of Physicians. The database also includes scientific material from major British universities, digitised as part of the BAAS project.

Information in the archives includes field notes on Hausa Islamic law, beginners' lessons in the Mole language spoken in parts of Ghana, research for a government investigation into early-Victorian mine ventilation, reports on an earthquake in Erzerum, Turkey in 1859, a recipe for a "very rare and excellent" seventeenth-century "wound drink", and a huge range of maps. The Royal College of Physicians collections include a number of digitised incunabula and medieval printed books. For those items which might be harder to read, automated transcriptions are available.

Unfortunately the database cannot currently be used from outside the Library, but we are open again and any reader with an interest in the history of science is highly recommended to come in and try it out.

Left: Trofim Lysenko in 1938. Picture in public domain. Right: Donald Michie c. 1980s. (Add MS 88958/5/4). Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

In August 1957, a 33-year-old Donald Michie travelled across Europe to visit Moscow. The journey was a remarkable one. Driving through Germany and Poland in a 1948 Standard drop head coupé with his friend from Oxford, John Matheson, the pair had lively encounters with enthusiastic locals, a Polish hitchhiker, and even an offer for their car from a film director in Russia.ⁱ

Whilst visiting the Institute of Genetics in Moscow, Michie had a chance encounter with Trofim Lysenko, the infamous Soviet geneticist. Seizing the opportunity, a five-hour interview between the two and Lysenko’s colleagues ensued, with a transcript and reports following in British publications over the following 12 months. What had started out as the tour of a young socialist had turned into a golden chance to meet and interrogate the man at the centre of one of the greatest scientific controversies of the twentieth century.

The British scientific community was rocked in the 1940s and ‘50s by the rise of Lysenko to Director of the Institute of Genetics in Moscow. His theories and methods (both scientific and as a political figure) prompted resignations from scientific societies, radio broadcasts and journal articles denigrating him, and no small degree of infighting as people attempted to separate the emerging Cold War political divide from the scientific merits (or demerits) of his work. Michie, as a young geneticist forging his career in this time, found himself at the heart of this.

Lysenko was a neo-Lamarckist, arguing that characteristics acquired in response to the environment an organism lives in could then be passed on to future generations. The traditional view of the 1950s, based on the work of Gregor Mendel, was that the environment’s role was limited to accelerating or slowing down random mutations of genes. Lysenko’s belief in this view was not the only factor in driving controversy. The international scientific community was also concerned by the state endorsement of his science within the Soviet Union, prompting the disappearance, side-lining, or death of prominent critics, such as N. I. Vavilov. Lysenko’s precise liability remains an issue of contention to this day.

Michie’s visit to the Institute of Genetics. Left to right: Kosikov, Ružica Glavinic, John Matheson, Trofim Lysenko, Nuzhdin, Anne McLaren and Donald Michie. Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

Michie was carving out his career in genetics in the 1950s. By 1953, he had finished his DPhil in mammalian genetics under the supervision of E. B. Ford at Oxford. He then moved to work as a researcher at UCL alongside notable figures such as J. B. S. Haldane, Michie’s second wife and celebrated biologist Anne McLaren, and future Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar. Michie had already dipped his toe in the waters of the Lysenko debate in a remarkable exchange of letters to an obscure rabbit breeders’ magazine, Fur and Feather, showing himself unafraid to side with controversy as he argued in favour of testing Lysenko’s theories.ⁱⁱ

First page of Donald Michie, ‘Interview with Lysenko’, Soviet Science Bulletin, V (1 & 2, 1958), 1-10. Add MS 89202/11/6

The interview with Lysenko revolved around a major theme from Michie: would Lysenko be prepared to share his methods, publish work in English and permit exchanges of personnel with Western institutions? Michie’s belief was that differences between the West and Soviet Union could be overcome through collaboration and openness, fostering a spirit of sharing knowledge. Lysenko agreed with the sentiment, responding:

I do not agree with this division into Western genetics and Soviet genetics. Science is unitary. I believe, and my colleagues believe, that science knows no frontiers.ⁱⁱⁱ

Both Michie and Lysenko argued for letting scientific results win the debate, however they understood the obstacles in the way of that outcome rather differently. Lysenko saw bad faith and entrenched attitudes from Western scientists, believing them unwilling to entertain the possibility of Soviet scientists producing good research. Michie saw barriers to accessibility, such as the poor understanding of the Russian language in the West. He criticised the stubbornness of Lysenko and his colleagues to share their techniques and offer work for publication in English journals, whilst also castigating Western scientists for not engaging with the science and testing it rigorously and with an open mind.

Ultimately, Michie concluded from his meeting with Lysenko:

The only certain remedy that I can see is to reunite the genetical profession in a single scientific brotherhood irrespective of politics, nationality or genetical creed. … In more definite terms, Soviet and East European biologists must be willing to publish in Western journals and vice versa.^iv

The question which follows is: Did Michie’s interview impact Lysenko’s reputation in Britain?

The short answer is probably not. For instance, Michie drew upon Lysenkoist scientists in a remarkable 1958 essay reflecting on 100 years since Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.^v The references to Lysenkoists were not well-received by reviewers, with them finding Michie’s piece out of step with the tone of the other essays in the collection. Lysenko’s reputation was, at least in the late 1950s, still entrenched negatively in the Western scientific world.

Shortly after these interventions, Michie drifted away from the world of genetics to pursue his long-standing interest in computers and artificial intelligence following his move to the University of Edinburgh in 1958. As such, his contributions on Lysenko petered out. He would go on to become one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence research in the United Kingdom. Never one to shy away from controversial topics, he found himself at the centre of the heated Lighthill debate in the 1970s concerning the funding of AI projects.

Lysenko’s reputation has largely remained contentious in the UK. Whilst there have been attempts to rehabilitate his science and separate it from his political reputation, such as by Chinese scientist Yongsheng Liu in the early 2000s, there is still a great deal of baggage associated with Lysenko.

Reflecting on the Lysenko controversy nearly 50 years later, Michie remarked:

Perhaps history is not after all a documented story of what probably happened. Rather, perhaps history is whatever tale of mystery and imagination becomes in the end too embedded to set straight.^vi

Whilst this may have been one tale which Michie could not set straight, his open-mindedness and commitment to scientific exchange as an early-career researcher are admirable and fascinating to see in the face of such a controversial and fraught debate.

Matt Wright

Sources and Further Reading
Michie, D., ‘The Moscow Institute of Genetics’, Discovery, October 1957, pp. 432-434, p. 434. Available in Add MS 89202/11/6.
Michie, D., ‘Interview with Lysenko’, Soviet Science Bulletin, V (1 & 2, 1958), 1-10, p. 4. Available in Add MS 89202/11/6.
Michie, D., ‘The Third Stage in Genetics’, in A Century of Darwin, ed. By S. A. Barnett, (London: Heinemann, 1958), pp. 56-84.
Donald Michie to Judith Field, 14 July 2005, in London, British Library, uncatalogued digital collection.

Matt Wright is a PhD student at the University of Leeds and the British Library. He is on an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership researching the Donald Michie Archive, exploring his work as a geneticist and artificial intelligence researcher in post-war Britain.

Donald Michie at the British Library
The Donald Michie Papers at the British Library comprises of three separate tranches of material gifted to the library in 2004 and 2008. They consist of correspondence, notes, notebooks, offprints and photographs and are available to researchers through the British Library’s Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue at Add MS 88958, Add MS 88975 and Add MS 89072.

i Details of Michie’s trip driving across Europe in a 1948 Standard drop head coupé are available in Add MS 88958/3/21.
ii These letters are available in the Donald Michie archive: Add MS 88958/3/20.
iii Donald Michie, ‘Interview with Lysenko’, Soviet Science Bulletin, V (1 & 2, 1958), 1-10, p. 4. Available in Add MS 89202/11/6.
iv Donald Michie, ‘The Moscow Institute of Genetics’, Discovery, October 1957, pp. 432-434, p. 434.
v For more details, see Donald Michie, ‘The Third Stage in Genetics’, in A Century of Darwin, ed. By S. A. Barnett, (London: Heinemann, 1958), pp. 56-84.
vi Donald Michie to Judith Field, 14 July 2005, in London, British Library, uncatalogued digital collection.

18th July 2020 is the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Gilbert White, the "parson-naturalist" best known for his pioneering work on the natural history and history of his parish of Sherborne, Hampshire. A number of posts are appearing on different British Library blogs to celebrate, but this post will discuss his influence on science to this day.

Stained glass window commemorating White in Selborne church, showing St Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds. All the birds shown in the window are mentioned in White's writings. Photograph by Si Griffiths under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Prior to White's work most scientific biology was based around the study of dead or captive animals in scientists' studies. White, who has been described as "the first ecologist" preferred to observe the animals and plants around his home, over long periods of time. These practices inspired Charles Darwin, whose observations of the finches of the Galapagos Islands initially inspired his thoughts about evolution by natural selection. On a more popular scale, White's influence is seen by some as creating birdwatching as a hobby.

Although more laboratory-centric biologists have occassionally dismissed White-style naturalism as dilatanttish or twee, it has become increasingly important since the mid-twentieth-century, especially in the study of environmental conditions, and of animal behaviour - "ethology".

One of the oldest sites of long-term nature-observation studies in Britain has been Wytham Woods in Oxfordshire. Nicknamed the "laboratory with leaves", it was donated to Oxford University in 1942 by Colonel Raymond ffenell, although some observation had been carried out there since the 1920s. Colonel ffennell was a member of the wealthy and socially prominent German Jewish Schumacher family, who had become rich through his involvement in the South African gold-mining industry, and adopted his wife's surname to avoid anti-German prejudice during World War I. Ever since, a host of research projects have been carried out there on all kinds of animals and plants, as well as climate and soil conditions.

One of the most important discoveries to have been made through long-term environmental observation was the discovery of the damage caused to the environment by acid rain in North America, which came from Gene Likens' observational work at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire, beginning in the 1960s. 

Equipment cabinet at Hubbard Brook containing apparatus used for continuous monitoring of a stream's pH. Used non-commercially with permission of USDA Forest Service.

A listing of current long-term environmental observation sites is maintained by the International Long Term Ecological Research Network (ILTER) on their database DEIMS-SDR (Dynamic Ecological Information Management System - Site and Dataset Registry). See also the review article by Hughes and others with links to many examples.

The modern science of animal behaviour, or ethology, was developed in the 1930s by Nikolaas Timbergen, Konrad Lorenz, and Karl von Frisch. All three did most of their research on domestic or captive animals, but the discipline would later see the importance of long-term observation of the behaviour of wild animals in their natural habitats. Three of the most famous practitioners of this were the so-called "Trimates", known for their observations of wild apes - Jane Goodall with chimpanzees in Tanzania, Dian Fossey with gorillas in Zaire and Rwanda, and Birute Galdikas with orang-utans in Indonesia. Another example which has achieved fame outside science, although not yet enough, is Dave Mech's disproof, from observations of wild wolves in Minnesota, of the outdated "alpha wolf" model of social dynamics in wolf packs, which has influenced a great deal of beliefs about dog-training and even human interactions, but was derived from observations of what turned out to be disfunctional behaviour in captive animals.

It is also possible to follow in White's footsteps yourself, by taking part in a citizen science project based on observing nature in your garden or in your wider local area. The Countryside Jobs Network maintains a list of opportunities, which aren't just in rural areas.

We hope that you look a bit more closely at the nature around you this weekend!

Diary in the 17th century: The autograph manuscripts of John Evelyn's Diary  Copyright © The British Library Board

‘But one shower of rain all this month.’ - entered John Evelyn in his diary on 29th April 1681. What would you write about April 2020 in your diary?

Diarist: John Evelyn (31 October 1620 – 27 February 1706) Copyright © The British Library Board

Unbeknown to him, Evelyn was also a chronicler of climatic change. His weather notes provide us with data on the period dubbed as the Little Ice Age in Europe. In his diary he noted numerous extreme weather events. The first reference in 1636: ‘This year being extremely dry’, continued later with extreme cold winters when the Thames froze over for weeks, extreme heat, and extreme wind including hurricanes, and unseasonal weather at various times of the year. 

1st January 1684
The weather continuing intolerably severe, streets of booths were set upon the Thames ; the air was so very cold and thick, as for many years there had not been the like. The small-pox was very mortal.

 

9th January 1684
I went cross the Thames on the ice, now become so thick as to bear not only streets of booths, in which they roasted meat, and had divers shops of wares, quite across as in a town, but coaches, carts and horses passed over.

 

11th August 1695
The weather now so cold, that greater frosts were not always seen in the midst of winter ; this succeeded much wet and set harvest extremely back.

25th June 1652

After a drought of near four months, there fell so violent a tempest of hail, rain, wind, thunder and lightning, as no man had seen the like in this age ; the hail being in some places four or five inches about, brake all the glass about London especially at Deptford, and more at Greenwich.

 

21st January 1671
This year the weather was so wet, stormy, and unseasonable, as had not been known for many years.

 

21st April 1689
This was one of the most seasonable springs, free form the usual sharp east winds that I have observed since the year 1660 (the year of the Restoration), which was much such as one.

The Second Work which he [Wren] has advanced, is the History of Seasons: which will be of admirable benefit to Mankind, if it shall be constantly pursued, and deriv'd down to Posterity. His proposal therefore was, to comprehend a Diary of Wind, Weather, and other conditions of the Air, as to Heat, Cold, and Weight; and also a General Description of the Year, whether contagious or healthful to Men or Beasts; with an Account of Epidemical Diseases, of Blasts, Mill-dews, and other accidents, belonging to Grain, Cattle, Fish, Fowl, and Insects.
Thomas Sprat (1667:315-6)

The bookplate of The Royal Society Note the Latin motto: Nullius in verba (Take nobody’s words for it)

Diary in 2020 [Photo: A. Deri, 6 May 2020]

The first page of the letter from Caroline Herschel on display in the Treasures Gallery

Happy birthday Caroline Herschel!

Today is the 270th anniversary of the birth of the German-born British astronomer Caroline Herschel, who discovered eight comets and fourteen nebulae. She also produced an expansion and correction of the previous main British star catalogue, created in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century by John Flamsteed, and made substantial contributions to the catalogue of nebulae and star clusters published after her death by her nephew John F W Herschel. She made heavy contributions as well to the work of her elder brother William Herschel, famous as the discoverer of Uranus.

Caroline Hershel was born in 1750 in Hannover in Germany, the daughter of a military musician. As the youngest daughter of her family, it was assumed by convention at the time that she would devote her life to helping her mother maintain the home and look after her father and elder brothers, which she resented. Her escape from this came when her brother William invited her to move to England and join him in Bath, where he was working in the family tradition as a musician. Caroline became a promising singer, but when her brother shifted his interests from music to astronomy he assumed once again that she would naturally help him in his own career. Over the years, despite this unwilling beginning, she became genuinely enthusiastic for the subject. In 1782, William was appointed Royal Astronomer by George III (not to be confused with the older position of the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich) and the pair moved to Datchet near Slough, to be closer to the royal home at Windsor. In 1787, William pursuaded the King to pay Caroline a salary in her own right, making her the first woman in Britain to be employed as a scientist.

The work was not just intellectual but physically demanding. William and Caroline had to construct their own telescopes and spend hours in the open air at night making observations. William's telescopes were some of the largest in the world at the time, being from twenty to forty feet in length. On one occasion, Caroline fell and impaled her leg on part of a telescope, losing a two ounce lump of flesh and suffering an injury which a military surgeon later told her would have entitled a soldier to six weeks spent in an infirmary.

Caroline's contributions have traditionally been undervalued due to a mixture of her personal shyness (coupled with disdain for people who she considered intellectually inferior) and her willingness to publicly depict herself as merely a submissive helpmeet to her brother, to avoid controversy, which were played up by subsequent commentators who wanted to depict her as conventionally feminine. Letters to her family which we hold here at the BL reveal her as a rather more strong-willed person, with a sardonic sense of humour.

After William's death in 1822, Caroline moved back to Hannover, where the position of her home in the centre of the city prevented her from much astronomical observation. In response, she devoted herself to compiling the catalogue of nebulae and star clusters. She died in 1848, increasingly physically frail in her later years but mentally sharp until the end.
We hold three copies of the first edition of Caroline Herschel's catalogue of stars, at the shelfmarks L.R.301.bb.2, 59.f.4, and B.265. The copy at L.R.301.bb.2 bears the bookplate of Charles Frederick Barnwell, at one time assistant keeper of antiquities at the British Museum, and is bound with a copy of the star catalogue of Francis Wollaston, another astronomer of the same era.

The letter from Caroline Herschel currently displayed in the Treasures Gallery is taken from the section of the Charles Babbage papers dealing with astronomy, Add MS 37203. It is a copy of a letter originally sent to Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal of the era, who was one of the few friends who Caroline was comfortable enough with to make an extended visit to. Her letters to close relatives while living in Hannover, which show a more outspoken side to her, are found at Egerton MS 3761 and Egerton MS 3762. The "Egerton" refers to the fact that they were purchased by the British Museum Library with money from an endowment created specifically to acquire manuscripts in the bequest of Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater.

Further reading:
Brock, C. The comet sweeper. Thriplow: Icon, 2007. Shelfmark YC.2008.a.3165, also available as e-book in the British Library Reading Rooms.
Hoskin, M. Herschel, Caroline Lucretia (1750-1848). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13100. Available online in British Library Reading Rooms.
Winterburn, E. The quiet revolution of Caroline Herschel. Stroud: The History Press, 2017. Shelfmark YK.2018.a.6511, also available as e-book in the British Library Reading Room

This post is part of a series highlighting some of the British Library’s science collections as part of British Science Week 2020.

Codebreaker? Geneticist? Computer scientist? There is no single label which best encapsulates the wide reach of Donald Michie’s career as a scientist. In nearly 70 years of research, Michie crossed paths with some of the most well-known scientific names of the twentieth century, such as Alan Turing and Trofim Lysenko, and was at the forefront of two contrasting fields of scientific research.

Michie was born to a middle-class family in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar) in 1923, son of a British Empire banker. As was typical for young British boys of the Empire, he was sent back to Britain to boarding school for his education, attending Rugby School.

As a young man, fresh out of school and armed with a scholarship to study classics at Balliol College, Oxford, Michie accidentally found himself on a codebreaking course at Bletchley Park in 1942, in the middle of World War II. Intending to attend a Japanese language course, he had inadvertently turned up six months early, but was pointed to a codebreaking course, which he excelled at, returning after hours to revise and practice. Upon completing the course, he was assigned to the Newmanry (a group within Bletchley), cracking the Lorenz cipher.

Donald Michie c. 1940s (Add MS 89072/1/5). Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

 During his time at Bletchley, Michie befriended Alan Turing, whom he bonded with over their (relatively) poor standard of chess play. Their shared interest in playing chess badly and work on what we would now consider early computers led Michie and Turing to wonder: could machines be taught to play chess? And, beyond that, could machines think?

The latter question would form the basis of one of Turing’s best-known papers in 1950, a paper which still influences modern computer and AI research. The former led to Michie and Turing theorising their own chess-playing programmes on paper, with the hope that one day they could run them through a computer to test who’s played better. The programmers of Manchester’s early computers put paid to that prospect in the early 1950s, and the Turing-Michie computer chess match never took place.

One popular story abounds for Michie and Turing: during the war, Turing was known to trade his money for bars of silver, which he then buried in various spots around Bletchley Park. He made no note of the location of his silver, for fear of wartime invasion and discovery by the Germans. Post-war, Turing enlisted assistance from Michie to help locate it using a ‘gimcrack’, home-made metal detector. The search for Turing’s buried silver ingots around the grounds of Bletchley proved fruitless, and they remain lost to this day.

Following the end of the war, Michie turned his attentions away from computing and took up his place at Oxford, however not to study classics, as originally planned, but medicine instead. In his own words: ‘After the war, I had been switched on to computing, but there weren’t any computers to do experiments with. I had to do something, so I became a biologist.’ Michie earned his PhD in mammalian genetics in 1953 under the supervision of Ronald Fisher, then moved to the Department of Zoology at University College London. There, he worked alongside his second wife, Anne McLaren, exploring genetic inheritance in mice. Large parts of Michie and McLaren’s work together has become central to the field, such as their work indicating that inbred mice were not best for experimentation. Perhaps most notably, their pioneering research on embryo transfer on mice would later be developed, especially by McLaren, to form the basis of human IVF treatment.

Michie’s research in the 1950s also brought him into contact with the ongoing debate in Britain around the work of Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko was a scientist whose theories dominated Soviet genetics and agricultural science from the 1930s to the 1950s. He took a Lamarckian approach to genetics, arguing that acquired characteristics could be inherited. For example, a mouse which grows a long tail in response to a hot climate could then pass this trait on to its offspring. This theory was hotly contested outside the Soviet sphere of influence, conflicting as it did with the prevailing theories of genetics in Western Europe and the USA. Michie, however, saw some value in Lysenko’s theories and advocated for them to be tested in Britain by both professional scientists and amateur gardeners, hoping this would give the approach greater credibility.

Michie eventually came face-to-face with Lysenko in a chance encounter during a visit to the Moscow Institute of Genetics in 1957. Having camped across Europe in an old car with a friend, Michie met up with McLaren in Moscow, where the two of them interviewed Lysenko. Michie found Lysenko ‘stubborn, impatient, bigoted [and] intolerant’, yet also recognised qualities of ‘energies focussed in the search for understanding and the urge to communicate it’. According to Michie, it would take someone of Lysenko’s temperament and talents to make meaningful scientific advances, or even to ‘revolutionise’ an ‘old branch of knowledge’.

Donald Michie (far right) and Anne McLaren (second from right) with Trofim Lysenko (third from left), 1957 (Add MS 89202/5/48). Reproduced with permission of the estate of Anne McLaren.

 Whilst Lysenko’s fame and appeal faded into the 1960s, Michie’s interest in international exchanges and the sharing of scientific knowledge and practices did not. He hosted many Soviet researchers in Edinburgh and undertook numerous visits beyond the Iron Curtain himself, as well as trips to visit colleagues in the USA.

By the late 1950s, Michie was once again pursuing his interest in artificial intelligence (AI), taking on a bet from a colleague in Edinburgh (where he moved in 1958) that he could not produce a learning machine. The outcome, in 1960, was MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine), a matchbox machine which learned, through trial and error, how to play noughts and crosses perfectly. His bet won, Michie threw himself into AI research full-time, co-founding the Experimental Programming Unit at Edinburgh in 1965, followed by the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception there a year later.

Michie’s importance in AI was perhaps most evident in the early 1970s. Firstly, he and his team at Edinburgh built and programmed a robot, named FREDERICK (Friendly Robot for Education, Discussion and Entertainment, the Retrieval of Information, and the Collation of Knowledge). Freddy II could identify different parts of an object and assembling them. It was amongst the most advanced robots of its kind at the time, integrating perception and action in one machine.

Freddy with toy car, c. 1973. Reproduced with the permission of the University of Edinburgh.

 However, this progress was not deemed sufficient. The Science Research Council commissioned Professor Sir James Lighthill to conduct a survey of AI in Britain, and in 1973 he published his report. The report was damning, arguing that progress in AI research was insufficient to justify the funding it was receiving. A BBC TV debate followed at the Royal Institution as part of the series of science debates called, Controversy. Michie, alongside John McCarthy and Richard Gregory, took on Lighthill. The argument was ultimately lost in the eyes of the Science Research Council. AI funding took a heavy hit, with Michie’s department in Edinburgh one of only three university departments left engaging in AI research in the UK. The subsequent decade of AI underfunding came to be known as the ‘AI Winter’ as similar cuts were enacted in the USA.

Michie’s research into AI continued, founding the Turing Institute in Glasgow in 1983. During these later years, Michie returned to Turing’s ideas, in particular the concept of a ‘child-machine’, ‘an educable machine, capable of learning and accumulating knowledge over time’. To this end, Michie developed a chat-bot: Sophie. Sophie was intended as a challenge to the Turing test, i.e. can a machine convince a human it is human? To Michie, ‘the value of the Turing test is not what it says about machine intelligence, but what it says about human intelligence’. He gave Sophie a sense of humour, a backstory, a family; in essence, Sophie had a personality. Apparently ‘Southern California Trash’ was an apt accent for her personality when demonstrating the speech-generating software.

Donald Michie c. 1980s (Add MS 88958/5/4). Reproduced with permission of the estate of Donald Michie.

Donald Michie at the British Library
The Donald Michie Papers at the British Library comprises of three separate tranches of material gifted to the library in 2004 and 2008. They consist of correspondence, notes, notebooks, offprints and photographs and are available to researchers through the British Library’s Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue at Add MS 88958, Add MS 88975 and Add MS 89072.

Sources and Further Reading:
Michie, D., ‘Interview with Lysenko’, Soviet Science Bulletin, V (1 and 2, 1958), 1-10.
Michie, D., Donald Michie on Machine Intelligence, Biology and more, ed. by Ashwin Srinivasan, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
van Emden, M., ‘I Remember Donald Michie (1923 – 2007)’, A Programmer’s Place, 2009, https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/i-remember-donald-michie-1923-2007/ [accessed 30 October 2019].

Matt Wright
Matt Wright is a PhD student at the University of Leeds and the British Library. He is on an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership researching the Donald Michie Archive, exploring his work as a geneticist and artificial intelligence researcher in post-war Britain.

The 22nd of January is the birthday of the early modern lawyer, politician, and philosopher Francis Bacon, later Viscount St Alban (1561-1626). For the purposes of this blog, he is most famous for his contributions to the gradual evolution of scientific thinking, mainly expressed in his book Novum Organum, first published in Latin in 1620. We hold two copies of the first edition, published by John Bill. One is at shelfmark C.54.F.16, and has a bookplate in the name of John Bentinck, and the second is at 535.k.8.

Title page of the original 1620 edition of Novum Organum

Novum Organum was intended to be part of Bacon's life's work, The Great Instauration, which would have been a multi-volume work summarising practically all knowledge that existed during his lifetime and suggesting paths for further enquiry. He died long before completing it, although some sections of it dealing with particular subjects existed in manuscript and were published after his death. The book argues for knowledge of the natural world to be developed by collection and juxtaposition of experimental observations, refraining from forming hypotheses too early and attempting to force the information to fit them. While mature scientific method views hypotheses as more significant than Bacon did, his thought was an important reaction to earlier classical and medieval ideas about the natural world, which were based mainly on intellectual speculation.

Novum Organum is also important for its discussion of "idols", or fallacies and habits of thought which interfere with rational thought and prevent people from reaching correct conclusions. Bacon defines four types of these. "Idols of the tribe" are flaws of reasoning which are almost universal among human minds. "Idols of the cave" (an allusion to Plato's Allegory of the Cave) are biases and pre-occupations specific to each individual person. "Idols of the marketplace" are confusions created by the imprecision of language to describe the world, such as when people's understanding of the technical meaning of a word in science is confused by its everyday meaning. Finally, "Idols of the theatre" are mistaken ideas that persist because of their historic prestige and acceptance by authoritative figures.

It is not clear how much experimentation Bacon actually did. The amusing story spread by the memoirist John Aubrey that he died from pneumonia caused by an experiment to see if a chicken could be preserved by stuffing it with snow is nowadays doubted. His unfinished Utopian book New Atlantis was extremely influential in its depiction of "Saloman's House", possibly the first depiction of a scientific institute, which heavily influenced the founding of the Royal Society, just over thirty years after Bacon's death.

This post is the second of a pair to mark the period of the 25th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and is contributed by Andrea Deri, Cataloguer.

In addition to seafarers, fishers in the Mediterranean Sea applied oil as Pliny the Elder and Plutarch described. Divers released olive oil from their mouth and used the oil film on the sea surface as a ‘skylight’ for underwater fishing. Oyster collectors in Gibraltar did just the same. They made use of their observation that oil prevented ripples formation and the smooth surface allowed steadier and deeper penetration of sunlight for increased visibility under the water.

Seal hunters also benefitted from the smooth sea surface created by oil. In their case it was the common seal that ‘released’ the oil as 18th-century Welsh zoologist Thomas Pennant, shared hunters’ observations:

Seals prey beneath the water, and in case they are devouring any very oily fish, the place is known by a certain smoothness of the waves immediately above.

Common seals create an oily patch on the sea surface when they consume their oily fish underwater. Seal-hunters were aware of this phenomenon. From Thomas Pennant, British Zoology Volume I Plate XII (London, 1812:167) 728.f.26.

Pouring oil on the sea was practiced and endorsed even by the British Admiralty (1891) as a way to prevent waves from crashing over the vessel:

Many experiences of late the utility of oil for this purpose is undoubted, and the application is simple. […] A very small quantity of oil, skillfully [sic] applied, may prevent much damage both to ships (especially the smaller classes) and to boats, by modifying the action of breaking seas.

The oil was often applied from an oil bag, ‘usually filled with oakum (teased rope fibres), and/or cotton waste, and fish oil was indeed the preferred (and cheapest) medium used.’ The oil bag was hung over the side of the vessel, immersed in the sea, windward, and pricked with a sail needle to facilitate leakage of the oil. […]’

Sea captain J. W. Martin describes the most recent use of oil bag in ‘launching or recovering ships’ boats, embarking or disembarking a pilot’ and makes the point that carrying an oil bag was compulsory in British ships’ lifeboats’ equipment until 1998.

It was Benjamin Franklin whose experiments provided impetus for exploring the science, the physics, behind the phenomenon: why and how oil prevented waves from breaking. In the spirit of Enlightenment Franklin used an experimental approach to triangulate and scientifically account for practitioners’ observations.

The correspondence of English and Dutch ‘learned gentlemen’ reveals their excitement and commitment for compiling oil stories from as diverse sources as possible – ‘ancient’ (Latin and Greek classics), ‘vulgar’ (lay knowledge), anecdotal, published and experimental – in order to defend the authority of either practitioners’ or natural philosophers’ approach to understanding the oil’s wave stilling effect.

Franklin acknowledges his bias towards ‘modern’ (18th century) ‘learned’ people’s knowledge compared to old and lay sources:

I had, when a youth, read and smiled at Pliny's account of the practice among seamen of his time, to still the waves in a storm by pouring oil into the sea […] [I]t has been of late too much the mode to slight the learning of the antients [sic]. The learned, too, are apt to slight too much the knowledge of the vulgar. This art of smoothing the waves with oil, is an instance of both.

This candid self-reflection is all the more interesting as Franklin and his fellow Enlightenment philosophers benefited from the data, which they snubbed at, for formulating their ideas. By privileging the fast-developing scientific approach, the ‘learned gentlemen’ facilitated the shift of epistemic authorities from traditional knowledge to science and contributed to the politically constructed divide between different ways of knowing.

A lifeboat approaching a ship in a stormy sea, from Description of the Royal Cyclorama, or Music Hall: Albany Street, Regent’s Park ... (London, 1849) RB.31.a.23(2)

Within the scientific paradigm, integration of practical and scientific inquiry remained a challenging enterprise with resistance from all involved.

However, a new paradigm seems to be emerging in the context of the unfolding climatic changes. While the authority of knowing still held by science, the relevance of local, traditional and indigenous ways of knowing appears to be slowly acknowledged (again):

Scientific knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, and local knowledge can complement one another by engaging both quantitative data and qualitative information, including people’s observations, responses and values. However, this process of knowledge co-production is complex and IK and LK possess uncertainties of a different nature from those of scientific knowledge, often resulting in the dominance of scientific knowledge over IK and KL in policy, governance, and management. [IPCC 2019:37]

The IPCC special report on ‘The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate’ published in September 2019 portrays science and local knowledge (LK) and indigenous knowledge (IK) as complementary, an attitude that pours oil on the troubled waters of the local knowledge - science nexus.

Thanks to Marja Kingma, Curator, Germanic Collections, BL European Studies; Dr. Saqib Baburi, Curator, Persian Manuscripts, BL Asian and African Collections with contributions from Arani Ilankuberan, Curator, South Indian Collections; Phil Hatfield, Head of Eccles Centre, BL Eccles Centre for American Studies and Julian Harrison, Lead Curator, Medieval Historical & Lit., Western Heritage Collection;

References and further reading:

Franklin, B. ‘Of the Stilling of Waves by Means of Oil. Extracted from sundry Letters between Benjamin Franklin, L.L.D. F.R.S. William Brownrigg, M.D. F.R.S. and the Reverend Mr. Farish’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1774, 64(0), pp.445–460. Available at: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1774.0044 [Accessed 3 December 2019].

Gilkes, M. F. ‘A Whatsit’ Mariner’s mirror, 2009. 95(3), pp.336–337. Shelfmark Ac.8109.c.

IPCC, 2019. Summary for Policymakers. In: IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.[H.-O. Portner, D.C. Roberts, V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, M. Tignor, E. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, M. Nicolai, A. Okem, J. Petzold, B. Rama, N. Weyer (eds.). In Press. Available at https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/  [Accessed 3 December 2019] 

IPCC and Allen, M.R., Global Warming of 1.5 oC?: Global Warming of 1.5 °C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. Technical Summary [in press]. [online] (Geneva, 2019) Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15_TS_High_Res.pdf. [Accessed 3 December 2019] 

Martin, J.W.C.F. ‘Oil Bag’. Mariner’s mirror, 2010, 96(1), pp.94–95. Shelfmark Ac.8109.c.

Mertens, J. ‘Oil On Troubled Waters: Benjamin Franklin and the Honor of Dutch Seamen’. Physics Today 59 (2007), 36. (P)PQ00-E(51) <https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2180175> [Accessed 3 December 2019] 

Pennant, T. British Zoology (London, 1812:167) Shelfmark 728.f.26. Volume I Plate XII

Pliny the Elder, Natural history, with an English translation in ten volumes by H. Rackham, M.A. (London, 1938)?
 Book II, CVI. 233 - CIX 235 page 360 Latin, page 361 English translation Shelfmark 2282.d.150

Plutarch, Moralia in Fifteen Volumes, with an English translation by Lionel Pearson and F. H. Sandbach (London, 1965)?
 Volume XI 854 E - 874 C, 911 C - 919 F Shelfmark 2282.d.96.

Taylor, A. D. and J.J.P Hitchfield, The West Coast of Hindustan Pilot: including the Gulf of Manar, the Maldive and Laccadive Islands (London, 1891) Shelfmark V 8711

Wyckoff, L. A. B. ‘The Use Of Oil In Storms At Sea.’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 23, (1886), 383–388. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/983222  [Accessed 3 December 2019]